Go ahead and call me a big ol’ p–sy (pansy), but in spite of a surprisingly strong desire to experience the upcoming radiosurgery treatment awake so I can write about it on this blog, I have taken the offer from Dr. Stapleford to have the treatment under anesthesia. WAIT, HOLD THE PRESSES, I just took a phone call from Dr. Stapleford and things have changed…..again.

So here’s the deal: The radiosurgery procedure will not happen tomorrow, no matter what. Now that my doctor knows the real level of my anxiety, she won’t agree to do the procedure tomorrow without my going through a “dry run” with the shrink wrap. If we decide to utilize the anesthesia, the procedure will be delayed another week to ten days. I simply am not going to wait that much longer to get this tumor zapped. Another delay is not an option for me.

My only option to get this procedure completed this week is to go up to Emory tomorrow and be strapped into my bean bag/shrink wrap apparatus for a dry run of at least a half hour. If I can get through that, we’ll be able to have the procedure done on Thursday. Since we had already made plans to stay tomorrow night in Atlanta, we’ll only lose a few hours on Thursday. So, this is what I’ve got to do.

I had a conversation with Amie Flournoy, my pharmacist at Glenn’s Pharmacy in Phenix City. She says that Xanax reaches its peak in your system in one to two hours and Ativan takes right at two hours to reach peak concentration. We will go on to Atlanta tomorrow and I’ll take a proper dose of one of these drugs two hours before I’m hog-tied. If I can get through that, then on Thursday we’ll do the real thing.

The only good thing that will come from this is that I’ll be able to properly write my way through this. If I had been asleep I would have had to count on my imagination to tell a proper story and chances are that story would include a return of the circus train and the strippers and my mother would have to buy another bottle of White Out.